Google and Microsoft have big plans for India

Google and Microsoft have unveiled great plans to bring more internet to India, following the recent visit of India’s Prime Minister to Silicon Valley.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft. The media have reported how Apple’s CEO Tim Cook visited him in the hotel. He visited the offices of Google, and had dinner with the likes of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and 350 other business leaders.

Soon after, announcements started pouring in: UK’s Business Insider reports how Google says it will install Wi-Fi in 400 train stations across the country.

Even though it might sound like an altruistic plan, in its core it’s still a business plan – every new person online is a potential customer for American tech companies. And India, as we know, has more than 1.25 billion people.

Language is also a big problem – The New York Times says only one in six Indians knows enough English to surf the web in the language.

“But there are few web pages in Hindi or India’s 21 other official languages. “There are more web pages in Estonian than in Hindi,” Mr. Menon said”, The New York Times writes in the report.

India is definitely a huge market, and one which the tech companies of the West will be looking at with both eyes wide open.

India won’t mind, though. "The world has started to believe that the twenty-first century belongs to India,” Prime Minister Modi said.